GIDEON LEVYTell me what’s untrue in Amnesty’s report on Israel

Gideon Levy, Haaretz, 3/2/2022

As the curses and screeches subside – Amnesty are antisemites, the report is full of lies, the methodology is absurd – one must ask: What, precisely, is incorrect in the apartheid report?

Israeli settlers and soldiers gather at the recently established wildcat outpost of Evyatar near the West Bank city of Nablus, July 2021. Photo: AP Photo/Oded Balilty

Was Israel not founded on an explicit policy of maintaining Jewish demographic hegemony, while reducing the number of Palestinians within its boundaries? Yes or no? True or false? Does this policy not exist to this day? Yes or no? True or false? Does Israel not maintain a regime of oppression and control of Palestinians in Israel and in the occupied territories for the benefit of Israeli Jews? Yes or no? True or false? Do the rules of engagement with Palestinians not reflect a policy of shoot to kill, or at least maim? Yes or no? True or false? Are the evictions of Palestinians from their homes and the denial of construction permits not part of Israeli policy? Yes or no? True or false?

Is Sheikh Jarrah not apartheid? Is the nation-state law not apartheid? And the denial of family reunification? And the unrecognized villages? And the “Judaization”? Is there a single sphere, in Israel or the territories, in which there is true, absolute equality, except in name?

To read the report is to despair. It’s everything we knew, but condensed. Yet no despair or remorse was felt in Israel. Most of the media marginalized and blurred it, and the hasbara choir batted it away. The propaganda minister, Yair Lapid, recited his lines and went on the attack even before the report was published. Diaspora Affairs Minister Nachman Shai was quick to follow. The international report has yet to be born that Israel won’t denounce while neglecting to respond to a single point it makes. One organization after another, some of them important and honest, call it apartheid, and Israel says: antisemitism.

Please, prove Amnesty wrong. That there aren’t two systems of justice in the territories, two sets of rights and two formulas for the distribution of resources. That the legitimization of Evyatar is not apartheid. That Jews being able to reclaim their pre-1948 property while Palestinians are denied the same right is not apartheid. That a verdant settlement right next to a shepherd’s community with no power or running water is not apartheid. That Israel’s Arab citizens aren’t discriminated against systematically, institutionally. That the Green Line has not been erased. What’s not true?

Even Mordechai Kremnitzer was frightened by the report and attacked it. His arguments: The report does not distinguish the occupied territories from Israel, and it treats the past as if it were the present. That’s how it goes when even leftist academia enlists in defense of Zionist propaganda. Accusing Israel of the sins of 1948 and calling it apartheid is like accusing the United States of apartheid because of the Jim Crow past, he wrote in Wednesday’s Haaretz.

The difference is that institutionalized racism in the United States has gradually disappeared, whereas in Israel it’s alive and kicking as strong as ever. The Green Line has been obliterated too. It’s been one state for a while now. Why should Amnesty make the distinction? 1948 goes on. The Nakba goes on. A straight line connects Tantura and Jiljilya. In Tantura they massacred, in Jiljilya they caused an 80-year-old man to die, and in both cases Palestinian lives aren’t worth a thing.

There is, of course, no propaganda without accolades for the justice system. “The important contribution of the government’s legal counsel and the courts, which, against a large political majority, prevented the banning of Arab candidates and lists for Knesset … An Arab party joining the coalition immediately puts the accusation of apartheid to ridicule,” wrote Kremnitzer.

It’s so good to wave the High Court of Justice, which has not prevented a single occupation iniquity, and Mansour Abbas to prove there’s no apartheid. Seventy-four years of statehood without a new Arab city, without an Arab university or a train station in an Arab city are all dwarfed by the great whitewasher of the occupation, the High Court of Justice, and a minor Arab coalition partner, and even that one considered illegitimate.

The world will continue to hurl the invective, Israel will continue to ignore it. The world will say apartheid, Israel will say antisemitism. But the evidence will keep piling up. What is written in the report does not stem from antisemitism, but will help strengthen it. Israel is the greatest motivator of antisemitic urges in the world today.

Download report

HAIDAR EIDSecular democracy and the future of Palestine

Haidar Eid, Mondoweiss, 28/1/2022

Haidar Eid was born in a refugee camp in Gaza (his parents came from the village of Zarnouqa, in the Ramla district, which was ethnically cleansed by Zionist gangs in 1948). He got his PhD from the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, where he stayed from 1997 to 2003, learning much from the anti-apartheid movement. He is Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Postmodern Literature at Gaza's al-Aqsa University. He has written widely on the question of Palestine, including articles published at Znet, Electronic Intifada, Palestine Chronicle, and Open Democracy. He has published papers on cultural Studies and literature in a number of journals, including Nebula, Journal of American Studies in Turkey, Cultural Logic, and the Journal of Comparative Literature. He is a founding member of the One State Campaign (OSC) and a member of Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). And last but not least, he sings. @haidareid

It is an established fact that Israel is an apartheid state. The questions then are - how to dismantle it and what comes next?

The two-state solution continues to lose support in Palestine. More and more Palestinians are realizing that that the so-called peace process has only resulted in the the production of new Israeli facts on the ground, and new repressive practices that make a functioning Palestinian State impossible. No wonder then that a recent poll conducted by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center indicates growing support for a one-state solution among the Palestinians at the expense of  the two-state solution.

The irony, though, is that the facts on the ground do not seem to have convinced the Palestinian leadership, right or left! Instead of fighting to crush Zionism and its apartheid policies in Palestine, the leadership of the PLO tries to coexist with it. Their argument, which have been shared by some international scholars and activists over the years, is that the two-state solution is supported by an “international consensus,” notwithstanding the fact it is nothing more than an unjust solution dictated by Israel and the US that it ignores our basic rights as humans. In this article I argue that the only hope for us, Palestinians, lies in an anti-apartheid form of resistance that mobilizes the components of the Palestinian people and international civil society and that ultimately leads to the establishment of single state in Palestine.

Apartheid Israel

It is an established fact that Israel is an apartheid state.  The latest reports by Human Rights Watch and even Israel’s most respected human rights organization, B’Tselem, not to mention reports by so many Palestinian human rights organizations, have concluded that the regime between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is an apartheid regime.

RAMZY BAROUDFrom the 'Iron Wall' to the 'Villa in the Jungle', Palestinians demolish Israel's security myths

 Ramzy Baroud, MEMO, 14/9/2021

Twenty-five years before Israel was established on the ruins of historic Palestine, a Russian Jewish Zionist leader, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, argued that a Jewish state in Palestine could only survive if it exists "behind an iron wall" of defence. Jabotinsky was speaking figuratively, but Zionist leaders after him who embraced his teachings eventually turned the principle of the iron wall into a tangible reality. Israel and Palestine are now disfigured by endless walls, made of concrete and iron, which zigzag in and around a land that was meant to represent inclusion, spiritual harmony and coexistence.

Gradually, new ideas regarding Israel's "security" emerged, such as "fortress Israel" and "villa in the jungle", an obviously racist metaphor used repeatedly by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, which depicts Israel falsely as an oasis of harmony and democracy amid Middle Eastern chaos and violence. For the Israeli "villa" to remain prosperous and peaceful, according to Barak, the state needed to do more than merely maintain its military edge; it had to ensure that the "chaos" does not breach the perimeters of Israel's perfect existence.

"Security" for Israel is not, therefore, simply viewed through military, political and strategic lenses. If so, the shooting of an Israeli sniper, Barel Hadaria Shmuel, by a Palestinian at the fence separating besieged Israel from Gaza on 21 August should have been understood as the predictable and rational cost of perpetual war and military occupation.

Read more 

Palestinians climb on top of Israel's controversial separation wall between the West Bank village of Bilin near Ramallah and the Israeli settlement of Modiin Ilit during a demonstration against settlements in the area, on February 17, 2017 [ABBAS MOMANI/AFP via Getty Images]